What is nasal resonance? How is it caused? What is its effect on the tones of the voice? These questions have never been answered. It can however be proved that a satisfactory science of Voice Culture is not in any way dependent on obtaining an answer to these questions. This much is definitely known:
1. If the resonance of the air in the nasal cavities exerts any influence on the tones of the voice, this influence cannot be increased, diminished, or prevented by any direct action on the part of the singer. Shutting off the entrance of the breath, by raising the soft palate, is possible as a muscular exercise. But it is impossible to perform this action, and to sing artistically, at the same time. To produce any kind of tone, while holding the soft palate raised, is extremely difficult. In a later chapter it will be seen that this action has no place whatever in the correct use of the voice.
2. As the nasal cavities are fixed in size and shape, the singer cannot control or vary any influence which they may exert as a resonator.
3. Independent of any thought or knowledge of how the nasal quality of tone is caused, the singer has perfect voluntary control over this quality by the simple, direct influence of the will. A singer may produce nasal tones, or tones free from this faulty sound, at will, with no thought of the mechanical processes involved. All that is required is that the singer have an ear keen enough to recognize the nasal quality in his own voice, as well as in the voice of any other singer.
[CHAPTER IV]
THE FUTILITY OF THE MATERIALS OF MODERN METHODS
Of the strictly scientific or mechanical materials of modern methods, four have been seen to be utterly erroneous. The remaining topics of instruction, mechanical and empirical, may with equal justice be submitted to a similar examination.
Several of these topics have already been critically examined. The rules for registers and laryngeal management were seen to be of no value to the student of singing. So also was it observed that all instruction which attempts to utilize the singer's sensations is futile. All that is left of the materials of modern methods, in which any valuable idea might be contained, are the rules for breathing.
Without undertaking to decide whether one system of breathing can be right, to the exclusion of all other systems, one general remark can be applied to the whole subject. It has never been scientifically proved that the correct use of the voice depends in any way on the mastery of an acquired system of breathing. True, this is the basic assumption of all the discussions of the singer's breathing. As Frangçon-Davies justly remarks,—"All combatants are agreed on one point, viz., that the singer's breath is an acquired one of some kind." (The Singing of the Future, David Frangçon-Davies, M.A., London, 1906.) This is purely an assumption on the part of the vocal theorists. No one has ever so much as attempted to offer scientific proof of the statement.